Took a flight from Thessaloniki to Dusseldorf, Germany, to London on Easter Sunday. I have NEVER seen an airport that dead before. We left around 11 a.m. from Greece so we were in Germany at a normal hour. DEAD. It was SILENT. We had a two hour layover so what did we do? Order up a German beer, of course. This is me and my friend Laura, from DC, traveling together. Once we got into London, we had to find our hostel which was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay outside of London (but what else can you expect with such low prices?). We found our way to the hostel then wandered around for a bit and eventually ending up at a pub for some fish and chips!
The strange thing about London is that public transportation is extremely expensive, but everything at a pub is super cheap. It costs 4 pounds (like $5 US) to buy 1 underground (subway) ticket. Ouch. However, you can buy a pint of beer and a plate of food for less than 7 pounds. Pints of beer run between 1-3 pounds (4 pounds if it’s expensive). I could not believe it. Drinks in Thessaloniki are so expensive it’s not even worth it to try and get one beer out here. A bottle of beer is usually at least 5 Euro.
Enough about prices, on to our tourist day! We got up early and went downtown London for some serious tourist time. We spent 10 hours walking around London, seeing everything we could possibly see! This includes: Parliament, Big Ben, the London Eye, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, and your basic everyday walking around and looking at cool buildings type of stuff. We were also pretty sure that we would eventually get hit by a car because it is confusing! It’s really funny though because they actually have words painted on the ground by intersections that say “look left” and “look right” so tourists don’t get run over. How thoughtful of them.
*London Tower Bridge at night
*Parliament and Big Ben
*Look out you crazy tourists!
*Buckingham Palace as we walked up to it. It was swarming with tourists
That day I also set out to buy myself a bus ticket to New Castle. This is a town a few hours north of London where my friend is studying abroad. We hadn’t seen each other in almost 5 years!!! It was really awesome to get to see her, even if it was only for a little while. She met me at the bus depot and we walked around the town. It was really cold, rainy, and foggy-which was funny because it was actually sunny and warm in London- but not too bad. After we had dinner, I saw her apartment and met her roommates and we went out for a drink. People in the UK really like to drink, if you couldn’t tell. That isn’t a stereotype, it’s really just true. I left to go back to London the next morning to meet back up with Laura. Later that night, we saw the play Chicago on stage in the theater district in London. It was awesome.
*Me and Stephanie!
London was the only place where I feel I had the “real” hostel experience. For anyone who doesn’t know, hostels are cheap rooms that fit 8-14 people in them on crappy bunk beds and you all get to share one shower. It’s basically like a college dorm. It’s an experience that I wanted to try because I’ve always heard really good things about hostels from my friends. It was pretty nice. We met some people from Canada, Switzerland, India, Portugal, and Australia. And one guy working at the hostel was from East St. Paul Minnesota! What a small world sometimes. Everybody in our room was really nice except somebody snored really loud and I’m still not sure who it was. It was a good time though.
Off to Dublin!
No comments:
Post a Comment